Director´s view

It is known all over the world that since July 1 we have the second baby of Chinese pangolin in Prague Zoo; its photos have been published in media from the United States to India to Japan. But this is how it started – and I happened to be around.

We walked through the large acclimatization enclosure in Kazakhstan’s Golden Steppe and looked around in vain for the three Przewalski’s horses that we released here. Finally, we noticed a movement in the distance. But it was only a solitary saiga.

The trucks raced through the steppe, raising high clouds of dust behind them, along the improvised road, which the grader dug for them a few days ago. The moment when three Przewalski’s horses, loaded on their decks, would be able to leave the crammed transport crates after more than thirty hours was approaching. At that...

Two CASA C-295M planes with Przewalski’s horses on board will take off from Prague and Berlin on Monday afternoon. Their destination will be the abandoned Arkalyk airport in central Kazakhstan. If everything goes well, the first phase of reintroduction of wild horses to this Central Asian country will be completed after more...

“Stay where you are. Don’t move,” German primatologist Daniela Hedwig was whispering into a loud gorilla shouting. “It is OK, just don’t move,” she repeated, and I wondered if I should pick up my camera and try to take the photo of my life. I had already tried to imagine this situation before and I had always ended...

According to the book of Genesis, Noah’s Ark was 300 feet long and 50 feet wide. Converted to current units, it measured roughly 135 to 22 metres. Squeezing a pair or even seven pairs of all animal species on to it must had been a completely impossible task.

We have already three “Przhevalsky’s” in the new Gobi Exhibit – three animal species, which were named after Russian geographer Nikolay Mikhaylovich Przhevalsky (1839–1888). Besides Przewalski’s horse it is Gobi racerunner (Eremias przewalskii) and Przewalski's toadhead agama (Phrynocephalus przewalskii).

Last Friday I published in a newspaper a photo of the gorilla female Mobi “looking out” for a sibling. By that I meant the baby, which Kijivu was due to give birth any day, if not any second.

Olgoi-khorkhoi – the mythical killing worm from the Gobi Desert – is perhaps better known today in Czech Republic than in Mongolia itself. It happened thanks to Czech enigmologists, who searched for it in local sand dunes. And on top of that, one of them, the late Ivan Mackerle, gave rise to olgoi-khorkhoi‘s world-wide...